Jay Reding.com

Or at least that’s what über-hack Glenn Greenwald argues — apparently seriously. He argues that the reason why Congress’ approval ratings are so low isn’t that they’ve done absolutely nothing but spend the last 8 months raiding the Treasury for their own interests, it’s that they haven’t spend enough time in pointless partisan witchhunts against the Bush Administration.

Of course, for those of us who don’t quaff Democratic Kool-Aid like it was going out of style, there’s another more likely explanation for why Congress’ approval numbers are in the toilet. It’s the same reason why the last Congress had low approval ratings: people are sick and tired of a “leadership” that does nothing but lines its own pockets. The #1 issue in 2006 was not the war in Iraq. It was corruption and ethics in government. Next year’s elections seem poised to follow the same model. The Democratic Congress has proven itself no less corrupt than the one that preceded it, and in fact, has done a worse job with reform. The same tide that swept the GOP out of power in 2006 is bearing down on the Democrats, but they’re too busy trying to torpedo the Bush Administration to care or notice.

The reality is that it’s not a lack of partisan zeal that’s hurting Congress (except among ultrapartisan Democrats like Glenn Greenwald), but a culture of corruption and a lack of ethics — and the Democrats in Congress are more interested in chastising the President than it fixing their own problems. The question of Congress’ approval ratings isn’t whether they’ll get better, it’s a matter of how low they can go. If the Democrats follow the advice of their own vicious partisans, we may yet see a Congress with single-digit approval ratings.

UPDATE: Then again, it’s not as though the Republicans are doing much better. The only think that might save the Democrats is that the GOP continues to miss the boat itself — although that bodes poorly for the state of American politics as a whole.

Jim Lindgren of The Volokh Conspiracy takes an interesting look at who fundamentalist Christians really are. As always, the popular stereotype of fundamentalist Christians all being Jerry Falwell clones couldn’t be more wrong:

Both academics and journalists sometimes depict Christian fundamentalists in the U.S. as particularly dangerous people, but these accounts seldom report what sorts of people tend to be fundamentalists in the U.S.

The group that most disproportionately belongs to fundamentalist Protestant sects is African-American females. In the 2000-2006 General Social Surveys, 62% of African-American females (and 54% of African American males) report that they belong to Protestant denominations that the GSS classifies as fundamentalist.

When one thinks of dangerous groups in the United States, religious African-American females would not be on many people’s lists. Yet of the people that I see on the streets every day, members of that demographic group are the ones most likely to be fundamentalist.

What about political party affiliation?

In the 2000-2006 General Social Surveys, 34% of Republicans are fundamentalists, compared to 30% of Democrats, not a large difference. But since there are more Democrats than Republicans, a slightly larger percentage of fundamentalists are Democrats (34%), compared to 32% of fundamentalists who are Republicans.

As to gender, in 2000-2006, 30% of women and 26% of men were fundamentalists.

So when one thinks of a typical fundamentalist in the United States in the 2000-2006 period, the image that should come to mind is that of a woman or of a Democrat. And if one thinks of which group is disproportionately fundamentalist, the exemplar is African-American females, not Republicans.

Of course, the term “Christian fundamentalist” has been distorted to be a term of derision used against any Christian that the user dislikes. However, these statistics do give a more realistic view of exactly who is included as members of Christian fundamentalist groups.

CNN is running a three-part series called “Holy Warriors” examining “fundamentalists” in both Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. As Power Line’s John Hinderaker points out, it’s likely to be yet another attempt to rhetorically conflate Christian fundamentalists with Islamic extremists:

Actually, though, the problem with today’s Islamic “martyrs” is not that its adherents are “willing to give their lives,” it is that they want to kill non-Muslims. It isn’t really a mystery why martyrdom was once considered noble; Christian martyrs like Saints Stephen and Sebastian didn’t kill anyone. Whereas today, “martyrdom” in much of the Islamic world is a euphemism for mass murder. Hence the “really bad connotation.”

Of course, everyone knows this. It’s hardly worth the trouble to point out the stupidity of confounding Christian “fundamentalism”–the most commonly accepted definition of which is a belief in the literal truth of the Bible–with Islamic “fundamentalism,” whose distinguishing characteristic is a desire to impose Sharia on the world, and kill everyone who resists.

As Lindgren quips “To be a success, at a minimum the mini-series should dispel more stereotypes than it perpetuates.” Sadly, the media is in the stereotype business, and expecting someone like Christiane Amanpour to take an honest and unbiased look at Christianity is expecting too much.

Christian fundamentalism is not the same as radical Islamic extremism: Christian fundamentalists have no interest in killing non-believers — there’s no support in Christianity for forced conversion by the sword. On the other hand, the Qu’ran makes it quite clear that Islam is by nature an expansionist religion, and the history of the Prophet Mohammad as a military leader makes that message quite clear. (Although, as with the interpretation of any holy book, there are differences of opinion. However, in general there is almost no textual support for militant expansionist Christianity and plenty of textual support for military expansionist Islam.) To conflate the two is to demean fundamentalist Christians — who represent a very large and diverse segment of American population — and to diminish the problems inherent in radical Salafist and Wahhabi Islam.

Not all fundamentalisms are alike, and the efforts to paint Christian fundamentalists as a bogeymen while paying little heed to Islamic fundamentalism is to misunderstand the basics of Christianity, Islam, and the world we live in.

Mitch Berg has a must-read post on learning the right lessons from the war in Iraq, specifically why Iraq is not an “unwinnable” conflict. He notes:

I remember the NARN’s interview with Steven Vincent, the freelance journalist who made such a name for himself covering Iraq, alone and without a net (and was eventually murdered on his second tour in the country, by criminals in Basra). In our final interview with him - the last interview he gave before leaving for Iraq the second time - we talked about the differences between the approach in the American and British-controlled regions of Iraq. The American zone was, true to “Neocon” dogma, taking the all-or-nothing route; full civil democracy, the whole enchilada, immediately. The British, drawing on centuries of experience ruling huge swathes of the world and immense native populations with a tiny military and civil servant cadre, had a different approach. They made deals with unsavory people to observe, rat out and countervail other unsavory people. They co-opted one group of thugs to smack down another group of thugs. They used, even exploited, criminal disorder to their larger goal - keeping relative order in their sector. Until recently, it worked -very arguably (Vincent was murdered in Basra, along with many other people, after all). They also kept their troops out among the Iraqis of the region, intermingling, buying their supplies locally, walking around without helmets or body armor (unless events demanded them) - and until recently, when the Brits announced their intention to start withdrawing, Basra was relatively peaceful compared to the miasma of Baghdad and Anbar.

They’ve done this - winning “unwinnable” counterinsurgency wars - before. In India from the 1600s through WWII, in the pre-Revolutionary American west, and South Africa in 1900, in Borneo and Malaysia and Aden and Oman in the sixties and seventies, the Brits learned the blocking and tackling of winning insurgencies: isolate the insurgents from the locals by being among the locals, by winning civilian hearts and minds, by co-opting other elements of the local society against the insurgents (including cultivating “friendly”, if often conventionally-unsavory, warlords, in the hopes of taming them when the crisis wanes - as, indeed, they did), and, when and if needed, following the isolated insurgent into the wilderness and hunting him down and killing him, using the minimal British force possible (and relying heavily on the locals to do the dirty work; British history is crowded with colorful characters who went overseas and “went native” leading indigenous troops in the service of the King; the British special forces, the SAS and SBS, are directly descended from such characters).

Berg is right, and our recent successes in Iraq have come precisely because we’re applying a new model to the conflict. Again, for all the talk about how there’s been no “change in course” in Iraq, the reality has been quite different: we’ve significantly changed course in Iraq under Gen. Petraeus, and that change in course has produced measurable, demonstrable results. We’re applying the tactics that worked in Tel Afar under the 101st Airborne to the Baghdad area, and that’s producing an area that’s not only free of terrorists — but is likely to stay free of terrorists.

In al-Anbar, we’re working with groups like the 1920 Revolution Brigades against al-Qaeda. Now the 1920 Revolution Brigades is a terrorist organization. No doubt some of the people we’re working with now were shooting and killing American soldiers as early as a few months ago. Yet as Mitch points out, that’s what we need to be doing. An erstwhile ally is better than a group like al-Qaeda, and the reality is that many of these groups are fighting for the same thing we are: an Iraq free of al-Qaeda and Shi’ite death squads.

The simple fact is that the stakes in Iraq are too high not to learn the painful lessons we’re learning now. Every future conflict in which this country will be engaged in the next century will look much like Iraq. Learning how to fight these wars is as important now as learning how to stop a Soviet tank push down the Fulda Gap was 50 years ago. We can either learn these lessons in iraq, or we can learn them later — and the next conflict might be one that was less about our choice and more about being drawn into something that had already become an abject nightmare.

The problem with the anti-war arguments is that most people who are on the anti-war side don’t know anything about military history. It’s rarely taught, and even educated people don’t have a clue about how a military fights and wins wars. Yet in order for someone to have an educated stand in Iraq, one has to study similar conflicts in the past and understand what works and what does not. To simply declare Iraq “unwinnable” is to give up not just on Iraq, but on being able to fight in the 21st Century. If such wars are “unwinnable,” then the 21st Century will eclipse the 20th as the bloodiest century in human history. As Satayana wrote, those who fail to learn history are damned to repeat it. Those who keep learning the wrong lessons are simply damned.

Thomas Sowell has a challenging editorial arguing that the left is invested in social failure:

The old advertising slogan, “Progress is our most important product,” has never applied to the left. Whether it is successful black schools in the United States or Third World countries where millions of people have been rising out of poverty in recent years, the left has shown little interest.

Progress in general seems to hold little interest for people who call themselves “progressives.” What arouses them are denunciations of social failures and accusations of wrong-doing.

One wonders what they would do in heaven.

There’s something to that argument. I certainly don’t think that progressives want to deliberately oppress people — that’s a crude stereotype. Rather, it’s more about the paving stones on the road to Hell. The “progressive” movement has the best of intentions, the problem is that the best intentions don’t translate into sound policy.

For example, in a perfect world, universal health care would be a reality. Abstracted from any concept of economics, it’s easy to argue that everyone should have the ability to get whatever health care they need whenever they need it without having to pay.

In a perfect world, I’d also like to be dating a fabulously wealthy supermodel with a Ph.D. who think I’m the greatest thing since sliced bread. Alas, we don’t live in a perfect world.

In our world, resources are finite and human needs are infinite. Exactly what constitutes a “decent” standard of living? By just about every measure, even the poor in this country live better than the fabulously wealthy did just a few decades ago. Technological progress has allowed people to live longer with a better quality of life than was physically possible just a few short years ago. Yet, the “progressive” movement still finds all manner of faults with today’s society.

And therein lies the problem.

There is no easily definable standard of what a “decent” standard of living is — it’s entirely subjective, and by nature a welfare state will always have to grow at rates that aren’t sustainable. It’s somewhat ironic that as the Democratic Party lurches leftward, following the “progressives,” the old bastion of state socialism in Europe is moving in a rightward direction. Both France and Germany elected leaders who promise the sort of reforms that would have once been unthinkable in those countries. As Europe faces extreme demographic pressure and the challenges of economic growth saddled by the weight of an unaffordable social “safety net,” reform isn’t an option, it’s a necessity.

Yet here in America, it seems like politics are moving in the other direction — towards the very same problems that Europe is facing.

The problem is that the left views the world through the lens of economic determinism. Hillary Clinton went out and said directly that poverty is not a social issue, but an economic one. The problem with that statement is that it simply isn’t true: the vast majority of poverty in this country is caused by behavior rather than economics. The key to significantly reducing poverty in this country is actually quite simple: make sure people stay in school, don’t have kids out of wedlock, and work full-time. The problem for the left is that government can only do so much to encourage people to do those things: they can’t force people to work, marry, and stay in school. The solution lies not with the state, but with communities, churches, and individuals.

The “progressive” movement keeps pushing the same old state-based solutions, all of which have already been tried. If state-based solutions were the answer, the Great Society programs of Lyndon B. Johnson would have significantly reduced poverty in America: instead both poverty and dependency increased.

It is precisely that dependency that makes “progressive” policies so potentially dangerous. The more one is dependent on the state, the more that dependency increases rather than decreases poverty. The real ticket to prosperity in this country is simple: hard work, family relationships, and spending wisely. Welfare undermines all of those things by replacing them with the government dole. The successes of the 1997 welfare reform program were in encouraging people to engage in the sort of personal behaviors that lead people out of poverty. The solution to poverty isn’t economic (although economics plays some role — the economy has to grow to keep poverty low), but largely social.

The reality is that the “progressive” movement isn’t really progressive. In many way, it’s the “progressives” who are the conservatives — they’re fighting to keep the society arrangements of the 1960s and 1970s in which there was strong state control over the economy, unions had massive amounts of political and economic power, and the leading minds viewed poverty as something that the government could fix.

However, we live in the 21st Century, and applying last century’s solutions to today’s problems is not the correct approach. What we need is a system that maximizes the ability of the individual to achieve economic and personal success free of government involvement while encouraging the behaviors that make that possible. That means strengthening America’s education system, further cementing the gains of the 1997 welfare reform plan, encouraging marriage, and ensuring that every American has a basic level of economic literacy.

So much of the “progressive” agenda takes us away from those goals. More taxes hurts the economy, and just as a rising tide lifts all boats, a sinking one strands the most vulnerable of our society. The sexual revolution has cheapened marriage, weakening the very mortar that holds our society together. Educational reform can’t happen if the government is unwilling to demand accountability, innovation, and choice — and that requires standing up to the teacher’s unions. The path out of poverty requires entrepreneurialism — which is much harder when small businesses must navigate through a complex maze of government regulations.

It’s time conservatives stopped playing defense on economic issues. We have the keys to significantly reducing poverty in this country. The values of the conservative movement are values which can lift people out of poverty. It’s said that the GOP represents the rich — well, it’s only natural that we would want more people to be rich. We can do that, but only if we’re willing to stand our ground and not take half measures that only further the problem.

The “progressive” movement won’t actually progress this country — quite the opposite. What we need now is not a defensive conservatism, but a full-throated defense of conservative values as the solution to poverty in America. That requires a leadership willing to deliver that message where it’s most needed: America’s inner cities.

We can reduce poverty in this country, and we can do it in a way that doesn’t make people more dependent, but more independent. That is the basis of the American Dream, and it is something worth defending. The only question is whether our political culture can produce the leaders willing to make it happen.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is saying that nobody would want him elected as President. Bloomberg’s love of nanny-statism makes him less than attractive as a Republican, and he doesn’t offer anything new in the Democratic field. A Presidential run would be a waste of money for Bloomberg — not that he has any shortage of it.

The New York Times has a piece on how DDT is returning as an effective control agent in the fight against malaria. After Rachel Carlson’s shoddily-researched Silent Spring motivated governmental agencies and NGOs to push for a virtual ban on the anti-mosquito agent, the subsequent explosion in the preventable disease has caused scientists to take a second look. Despite the anti-DDT fervor of the last few decades, DDT is effective in stopping human contact with infected mosquitos:

From the 1940s onward, DDT was used to kill agricultural pests and disease-carrying insects because it was cheap and lasted longer than other insecticides. DDT helped much of the developed world, including the United States and Europe, eradicate malaria. Then in the 1970s, after the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” which raised concern over DDT’s effects on wildlife and people, the chemical was banned in many countries. Birds, especially, were said to be vulnerable, and the chemical was blamed for reduced populations of bald eagles, falcons and pelicans. Scientific scrutiny has failed to find conclusive evidence that DDT causes cancer or other health problems in humans.

Today, indoor DDT spraying to control malaria in Africa is supported by the World Health Organization; the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria; and the United States Agency for International Development.

The remaining concern has been that the greater use of DDT in Africa would only lead mosquitoes to develop resistance to it. Decades ago, such resistance developed wherever DDT crop spraying was common. After the DDT bans went into effect in the United States and elsewhere, it continued to be used extensively for agriculture in Africa, and this exerted a powerful pressure on mosquitoes there to develop resistance. Although DDT is now prohibited for crop spraying in Africa, a few mosquito species there are still resistant to it. But DDT has other mechanisms of acting against mosquitoes beyond killing them. It also functions as a “spatial repellent,” keeping mosquitoes from entering areas where it has been sprayed, and as a “contact irritant,” making insects that come in contact with it so irritated they leave.

The DDT ban, as a consequence of environmentalist hysteria has resulted in an explosion of malaria throughout the developing world that has claimed millions of lives to a preventable disease. In terms of human catastrophes, the DDT ban has been one of the most horrendous misuses of science in human history — and its impact has irreparably harmed the developing world.

The lesson of the DDT ban gives us a stern warning about the problems of succumbing to interest-group hysteria — as other interest groups flog their pet policies, they tend to be blind to the consequences of those policies. The DDT ban was based on poor science and policymaking motivated largely by interest group politics. Such a combination is usually deadly.

As Glenn Reynold quips:

The debate over DDT is over. There’s scientific consensus. Anyone who disagrees is a DDT denialist and a mouthpiece for Big Mosquito.

Sadly, that sort of logic is all too prevalent, and it’s precisely that combination of shaky science and interest groups playing the politics of fear that led to the disastrous ban on DDT. With the hysteria over global warming reaching a fever pitch, the possibility of the developing world once again being irreparably harmed by the fear of others remains all too prescient. Millions died because of DDT hysteria. How many millions more will die due to the global warming scare?

Milblogger Dadmanly takes a long look at both John Edwards’ and Rudy Giuliani’s recent essays in Foreign Policy. There couldn’t be a bigger difference in the approach of the two:

Herewith Edwards transposes familiar liberal “crime fighting” orthodoxy onto the challenge of terrorism. Poverty causes crime, therefore poverty causes terror. Never mind that most Jihadis come from educated and privileged elites – except of course for those unfortunates that get fooled into serving as “suicide” bombers or children or the handicapped used as bomb camouflage.

If that’s not perverse enough, Edwards goes ahead and heaps on the rest of progressive orthodoxy: education as the “cure” for poverty, “Clean water and sanitation are also necessary to improve health, education, and economic prosperity,” universal (as in, worldwide) access to drugs and medical treatment. Mention of the Global Development Act, described as a kind of bureaucratic solution for redundant and ineffective global development efforts. Think DHS for global poverty, a “Global Poverty Czar” and the like.

Guiliani takes a different approach:

Note that Edwards and Giuliani point to the same ultimate goal for the US, better relations with the world. For Edwards and the Democrats, the strategy is to do whatever it takes to bring that about: the US must change. For Giuliani, the key to better relations is a common basis and acceptance of democratic norms and human rights: those who oppress and terrorize must change, or be overwhelmed.

Ultimately, the debate between Edwards and Giuliani is the same debate that’s been brewing for some time now — should the United States take a more servient role to international institutions, or should the United States take a more aggressive role? Or, in a more simplistic fashion, should the US be a leader or a follower?

Edwards demonstrates that he’s a foreign policy lightweight. If more international aid were key to defeating terrorism, why is Egypt, the #1 recipient of US foreign aid still a source for Islamic radicalism and the home of both Mohammad Atta and Ayman al-Zawahiri? Why does Egyptian state television continue to push anti-Western and anti-Semitic viewpoints? If poverty is really the root cause of terrorism why do most terrorists seem to come disproportionately from the middle to upper classes?

Edward’s foreign policy ideas are drawn from the same stagnant well as the failed ideas of the early 1990s. Now that the world is more astutely aware of the danger posed by terrorist groups, returning to those failed policies would be nothing short of disastrous. As Mayor Giuliani points out, al-Qaeda’s history indicates that each time the United States showed weakness in the face of their provocations, they hit back harder the next time. Strength does not breed terrorism, weakness does, and even bin Laden himself has said as much.

Edwards’ foreign policy is as free of real substance as the rest of his campaign. While there’s a real debate about how the US should conduct its foreign power and relate to international institutions, that debate can’t be conducted based upon fundamentally faulty premises. Giuliani seems to understand the way in which the world works — not the way in which some would like it to work, and in terms of crafting American foreign policy, naivete is fatal. Giuliani’s view of the world is the more realistic one, and his choice of foreign policy course is the one most likely to preserve the security of the United States.